LabVIEW 8.0, Crystal report -> PDF

[winterishere8]

Has anyone tried developing a crystal report, and calling it in LabVIEW 8.0 via .NET dll so it prints a pdf report similar to printing a standard report?

[Charlie S.]

Hello Maximus,

While I have never tried calling a crystal report .NET assembly (specifically) from LabVIEW, there are numerous examples of calling assemblies both on our website and in the LabVIEW example finder. The LabVIEW Help file is also a good starting point if you've never used .NET in LabVIEW before. From the Help menu, select "Search the LabVIEW Help..." On the Contents tab under "Fundamentals >> Windows Connectivity" you should find a lot of conceptual and step-by-step information. Furthermore, if you can find an example in another programming language that calls the crystal report assembly, you may be able to use that as a guideline for writing your LabVIEW code.

I have seen other posts on the forums pointing to third parties that have developed toolkits for crystal report, but I am not sure if they use the.NET API or not. Hope this helps,

[winterishere8]

Thanks for your reply. I've used .NET to call DLLS. I've not seen a decent example interfacing crystal reports and labview 8.0 so far. Any suggestions ?

[Charlie S.]

Hi Maximus,

I've looked through what resources we have here, but it does not appear that anyone has attempted to call Crystal Reports using a .NET assembly -- in LabVIEW 8.0 or any other version. The best advice I can give is to check out the object model for Crystal Reports (or any other documentation you can find). I found a decent website here:

http://support.businessobjects.com/global/interactive/xi/om/NET/default.html

There's also a link to the SDK documentation:

http://support.businessobjects.com/global/interactive/xi/om/NET/CRNET.zip

Since there are currently no LabVIEW examples, you can try piecing one together based on the examples contained in that file. While I (personally) have not done this sort of thing much with .NET, I have been very successful in translating ActiveX to LabVIEW. As I mentioned earlier, there are toolkits out there (built on ActiveX, I believe) that already connect LabVIEW and Crystal Reports.

I hope this helps you out at least a little bit!

[Dintis]

Hi Charlie,

I am looking for an example to create a report and print out using Crystal Reports from a database created using activeX. Where can I find an example. I am relatively new to LabView and just started using it.

e have purchased Report Generation Toolkit, but could not find an example for this. Can you please guide me?

Best Regards

Dintis

[Charlie S.]

Hello Dintis,

I have seen other postings about a 3rd party toolkit using Crystal Reports -- you may want to search for that. LabVIEW used to come with a Crystal Reports shipping example (back in the 6.0 days...). However, I imagine you probably don't have that version! I managed to dig up the old example here, and I've posted it below. I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with Crystal Reports itself. The links I provided on the earlier post may help, though.

Best of luck!